Rely on third parties with whom you have no trust relation to store important information

Focus on what’s new/important/good rather than what’s being used

Aquabrowser

[BONUS] Providing five databases when one would have sufficed

Well said. PLEASE click through and read the explanations for all of the points. I would urge academic library folk to look at these very seriously in a staff meeting.

In my book, this is gold:

… if you’re not actively working with the academic communities you serve — and I mean really listening to them, helping them do their work in their way — you’re not going to do a good job. Libraries and librarians are mostly good at librarying, unfortunately the rest of the world isn’t interested; stop it.

The same might be said for instructional support in many institutions. <cough> Firefox <cough>

6 thoughts on “Ten Things… about Academic Libraries”

I don’t know. Isn’t Aquabrowser the tool that U of Chicago is now using? Someone in my Library User Instruction class did a session on it…and it’s freaking Sweet!! So I don’t really think that would be a step back as much as about…a million steps forward from bland boring catalogs that nobody uses.

Leah – I haven’t used Aquabrowser that much… I’m glad you liked it. I’ll have to investigate further. Maybe we need a learning lab at school where we can pit ILS and ILS features against each other for comparison.